leonine

Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

adjective Of, relating to, or characteristic of a lion.

adjective Resembling or suggestive of a lion, as in being powerful or dignified.

from The Century Dictionary.

Pertaining to or resembling a lion; lion-like: as, leonine fierceness or rapacity.

In prosody, consisting of metrical Latin hexameters or elegiacs (alternate hexameters and pentameters), in which the final word rimes with the word immediately preceding the cesural pause or the middle of the line.

Pertaining to a person named Leo, particularly to several popes of that name; more specifically, of or pertaining to Leo I., the Great (pope from 440 to 461), who is said to have added certain words to the Roman canon of the mass, and whom some have even, without good reason, described as the author of the Roman liturgy.

noun A coin illegally imported into England by foreign merchants in the reign of Edward I.

nounplural Leonine verse.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

adjective Pertaining to, or characteristic of, the lion

adjective a kind of verse, in which the end of the line rhymes with the middle; -- so named from Leo, or Leoninus, a Benedictine and canon of Paris in the twelfth century, who wrote largely in this measure, though he was not the inventor. The following line is an example

Examples

A programme that posits the notion of leonine alpha-male big beasts of the suburban conservatory sharing tobacco-smooth post-snifter badinage - not even behind a desk, but right out in front on the crotch-fanning plinth of the low-slung sofa - suddenly became noticeably stiff‑backed and taut, its banter infused with fresh levels of glazed menace.

The ANC could perhaps have said - as even Mahatma Gandhi wrote from jail in 1942 - that it could not condemn, without full information, people who were provoked to violence by the "leonine" violence of the regime when their leaders were confined and exiled.

Sketches of G. K.'s personal appearance abound, and if occasionally they contradict one another in detail they yet contrive to convey a vivid and fairly truthful impression of the "leonine" head, the bulky form, the gestures and mannerisms.

Nietzsche in Germany puts it forth as a philosophic principle that humanity exists not for the democratic purpose of securing the highest development of all, but for the aristocratic purpose of producing a race of supermen, an elite of strong, forceful, "leonine" beings.

She plays him from the inside out, revealing his interior struggles while making fully incarnate his exterior -- the irony, sarcasm, ecstatic beauty, paradox, and the leonine raging against an incipient silence.

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Comments

"In one of the two, Archer, to his surprise, recognised Ned Winsett; the other and older, who was unknown to him, and whose gigantic frame declared him to be the wearer of the 'Macfarlane,' had a feebly leonine head with crumpled grey hair, and moved his arms with large pawing gestures, as though he were distributing lay blessings to a kneeling multitude."